Garlic Chicken With Tony: Anthony Bourdain in Tbilisi

About twenty-three years ago, when Georgia was a charming little nation known more for kidnappings than its spectacular cuisine, I was sipping a cold beer with a New Yorker friend on the banks of the Mtkhvari River. He remarked that Anthony Bourdain "has totally got to come to Georgia." We brainstormed itineraries and menus for a Bourdain tour and then shelved our fantasies in that closet of fanciful notions we all have - or at least I did. My friend actually lobbied Bourdain over the years through various channels, including spamming his Twitter account with messages like “dude, you really need to come to Georgia.” 

I don’t know what effect a dozen years of my buddy’s pestering had, but in October 2015 Bourdain’s producers contacted me for a brain-picking session. Their show, Parts Unknown, was finally coming to Georgia. I had been living abroad since 1996, away from American TV, and had never seen a complete episode of his travel programs but I adored Bourdain because of his book, Kitchen Confidential, a masterful memoir that resonates profoundly in anyone who has ever stepped into fighting whites to live the puta vida. I loved it so much I bought his fun but far less sagacious novel, Gone Bamboo. I called my friend and told him Bourdain was coming. 

The producers called me by Skype. They were gathering as much background as possible from every source they could find, including a friend who wrote her memoir of living in Georgia at the turn of the millennium, but hadn’t lived here since. A whole lot had changed since then, but nevertheless, they said she would fly in from Paris to be his sidekick and that they would try to call me to maybe meet for a drink with Tony.

That call came on the morning of November 14 as I was in bed massaging my head, a pounding miserableness that smacked of dirty chacha. My five-year old daughter was doing her fart in daddy’s face trick to rouse him while a voice on the phone told me there had been terrorist attacks in Paris and that the writer had to return home immediately before they could shoot. “Can you meet us at Gabriadze’s in an hour?” Then I understood. I was going to have lunch with Anthony Bourdain.

I might have suggested Gabriadze’s in those brainstorming sessions with my friend, for it was by far the coolest place in Tbilisi, if not the country. Rezo Gabriadze was a famous screenwriter and director of a puppet theater in the basement of his “cafe,” a crooked brick and wooden Old Town house furnished in mismatched tables and chairs and decorated in Rezo’s folk art and theater posters. At a time when every restaurant’s menu was pretty much identical, Gabriadze’s offered some nuanced touches and a kick ass apple cobbler. But by 2015, after the city gentrified the neighborhood, the remodeled cafe lost its soul while chefs across the city were busy redefining the concept of traditional cuisine. This is not where I would have brought Bourdain.

He was taller than I imagined and in great shape for a man tortured by decades of blazing skillets and ardent substance abuse. I figured I’d break the ice by mentioning my chacha hangover. “Oh man, don’t mention the word chacha,” he said gazing blankly out the window. “We drank the hotel bar dry of its chacha last night.” 

The sound guy wired us up and the director asked us to walk around outside. I had forgotten that I was called to talk about Tbilisi, my home since 2002. I was walking with a famous chef, and he knew Rick Tramonto, the last chef I worked for in Chicago before I gave up cooking to paint houses and play the blues. 

“Rick? He’s a Christian now. He and Gail divorced...” 

“No shit? He used to change the color of his mullet every week, said his dream was to be a rock and roll roadie...”

Then I rambled about myself unaware that all he wanted to do was get through this segment and on to the next, and then the next, and then wrap the episode up and do it all over again somewhere else. It looks like he's having a blast on TV, but the man busted his balls to make it look that way. And in Georgia, he had the daffy misfortune of being ambushed with its magnanimous hospitality and by me. I plodded on about myself. This may have been his show, but it was my moment. 

“Ugh, I hate breakfasts,” he said responding to a recounted chapter of my past. “ I mean I love breakfast, but cooking them and the smell of all those eggs early in the morning…”

After a few minutes of this off-topic banter, the director steered us back, “You guys, Georgia,” and Tony slipped right into the groove as if he'd never left it. Back at Gabriadze’s, I haggled over our order with the manager. He pushed the chicken in raspberry sauce but it was November, berries wouldn’t be in season for another six months. My number one Bourdain fantasy dish was shkmeruli, baked chicken smothered in a creamy mountain of garlic and served in a round terracotta casserole dish. You dive in, snatch a chunk of chicken, ladle spoons of sauce onto it, lick the grease off your fingers and sop torn pieces of bread into the garlicky goo, leaving you vampire proof for a week. There is no more salacious dish to bond over. I insisted on shkmeruli with a raised fist.

When the cameras were on, so was Tony, totally unprocessed, highly engaging. I even thought me might actually like me, although I was not rising to the occasion. He fed me provocative questions but my feeble brain was still poaching in slowly evaporating chacha. I was useless without my computer and fingertips. When he said he sees lots of nice cars and that people seem to be doing alright, that was my cue to say, “Yes, if alright is eleven percent of the population making less than two bucks a day and teachers making less than $200 a month,” but I floundered and grabbed my beer instead. “They are going to cut me out of this,” I thought. Then the shkmeruli came. The manager came back with a small platter with half a roasted chicken, quartered, and poured a couple dollops of lightly garlicked cream from a sauce boat.

There was still plenty of food on the table when we wrapped. We stood up while the cameraman shot cutaways with the sound man’s hands and Tony said “I need to go back to bed” and walked to the door, stopping to pose for a couple of group pictures. He and the crew were staying at Rooms Hotel, down my street. I was invited to join them but passed. I had had my moment. I called my New Yorker buddy and told him where he could find Bourdain.

Note: An older version of this story appeared in Eurasianet.org